pain, looking forward in a sort of desperate hope to a freedom not yet realized (Rom. 8:19-24).  Nature is far less tragic for Jesus, far happier—­perhaps because he knew nature on closer terms of intimacy; Nature, as he portrays things, is in nearer touch with the Heavenly Father than we should guess from Paul[10], and there is no hint in his recorded words that he held the ground to be under a curse.  If we are to use abstract terms and philosophize his thought a little, we may agree that the four facts Jesus notes in Nature are its mystery, its regularity, its impartiality, and its peacefulness[11].  What he finds in Nature is not unlike what Wordsworth also finds—­

                         A Power
    That is the visible quality and shape
    And image of right reason; that matures
    Her processes by steadfast laws; gives birth
    To no impatient or fallacious hopes,
    No heat of passion or excessive zeal,
    No vain conceits; provokes to no quick turns
    Of self-applauding intellect; but trains
    To meekness, and exalts by humble faith;
    Holds up before the mind intoxicate
    With present objects, and the busy dance
    Of things that pass away, a temperate show
    Of objects that endure?[12]

This is not a passage that one could imagine the historical Jesus speaking, or, still less, writing; but the essential ideas chime in with his observation and his attitude “for the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear” (Mark 4:28).  Man can count safely on earth’s co-operation.  From it all, and in it all, Jesus read deep into God’s mind and methods.

It has often been remarked how apt Jesus was to go away to pray alone in the desert or on the hillside, in the night or the early dawn—­probably no new habit induced by the crowded days of his ministry, but an old way of his from youth.  The full house, perhaps, would prompt it, apart from what he found in the open.  St. Augustine, in a very appealing confession, tells us how his prayers may be disturbed if he catch sight of a lizard snapping up flies on the wall of his room (Conf., 10:35, 57).  The bird flying to her nest, the fox creeping to his hole (Luke 9:58)—­did these break into the prayers of Jesus—­and with what effect?  Was it in such hours that he learnt his deepest lessons from the birds and the lilies of the field?  Why not?  As he sat out in the wild under the open sky, did the stars never speak to him, as to Hebrew psalmist and Roman Virgil?

    When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers. 
    The moon and the stars which thou hast ordained;
    What is man, that thou art mindful of him? 
    And the son of man, that thou visitest him? 
                                                (Psalm 8:3-4.)

It is a question men have to meet and face; and if we can trust Matthew’s statement, an utterance of his in later years called out by the sneer of a Pharisee, shows how he had made the old poet’s answer his own:—­